A Little Chit-Chat Goes a Long Way: Design and Evaluation of Task-and Person-Oriented Styles for Social Robots

Whereas the reception task is a promising application domain for social robots, knowledge is lacking about how to design the appropriate re-usable communication styles for a reception robot. This paper presents the use and evaluation of an iterative interaction-design (ID) method with which task- and person-oriented multi-modal communication styles have been designed for such a robot. First, we report on an evaluation study of the ID-method with Industrial Design students (N =13) who designed these two communication styles for a Pepper robot. This provided a set of distinct designs of the two styles, for which the differences in design parameters were in line with social science theory. The task-oriented style showed a more formal, shorter and less chatty communication. Second, we present findings from a Mechanical Turk study conducted to evaluate the perception of these style designs. Participants (N =301) were presented with videos showing the robot acting as a receptionist and were asked to rate their perception of the robot, the service experience and the orientation of the designs. Overall, the interaction with the robot was appreciated well. The robot with a person-oriented style was perceived to be more animate and likeable. Analysis showed that chit-chat was the main contributor to the perceived difference between the person-oriented and task-oriented styles. This is an important finding as it gives interaction designers a validated best-practice approach to make interaction style more or less personal.